Miss Teen South Carolina tells her story.

In the age of Internet memes, viral videos, and “YouTube fame,” it can be hard to remember that most of those things start with real people. When you repeatedly watch a hilarious “fail” video on your computer, chances are it’s not an actor getting paid to do something for laughs; someone actually failed at something. And while some people certainly do like to laugh at themselves (and willingly share their embarrassing moments), others are thrust into the negative spotlight in situations that are out of their control.

The latter happened to Miss Teen USA contestant Caitlin Upton in 2007, when her cringe-worthy answer to a pageant question about education in America went viral. The then 18-year-old was asked why one-fifth of Americans can’t locate the U.S. on a world map and flubbed her answer, struggling to put together a cohesive response. That moment was surely upsetting and embarrassing to Caitlin, but it was gold to the Internet; she became an instant target for criticism and bullying. “I lost a lot of close friends over it — people I’d been friends with since I was 10, people I grew up playing soccer with,” she told New York magazine. “One group of girls took me to this party at the University of South Carolina, and I walk in, and the entire USC baseball team surrounded me and bashed me with the harshest, meanest comments I had ever heard.”

Sadly, that wasn’t the worst of it: “And somebody once put a letter in my parents’ mailbox about how my body was going to be eaten alive by ants and burned in a freak fire,” she said. “And then it said, in all caps, 'GO DIE CAITE UPTON, GO DIE FOR YOUR STUPIDITY.'”

For those of us on the outside, moments like Caitlin’s tend to fade quickly from our memories as we move on to the next viral meme. But for her, in the eye of the storm, the harassment continued for years, and the resulting pain lasted even longer. “It was awful, and it was every single day for a good two years,” she said.

While Internet bullies used Caitlin as a sort of punching bag for their anonymous attacks, she continued to be a human being, with feelings, a heart, and a spirit that couldn’t withstand the beatings. “I definitely went through a period where I was very, very depressed,” she said. “I had some very dark moments where I thought about committing suicide. The fact that I have such an amazing family and friends, it really, really helped.”

While it's always fun to send viral videos to our friends and laugh about them together, stories like Caitlin's remind us that not everyone is always in on the joke. Regardless of the mistakes someone's made (and who among us hasn't accidentally said something we totally didn't mean because we were nervous, seriously?) it's important to remember that behind every meme, there's a real person who deserves to be treated with the decency we'd want for ourselves.